Bottle Baby

Augie March

Compositor: Glenn Richards

Bottle Baby

Your issue may walk among fine moral spires, But if they went up somebody else built them,
Your store is a small one, your goods have no buyers,
Your parents are raising your children.
O I could have told you the vices won't hold you warm in a coil where you lay,
But high up they hang you, seized by the temple,
And bid you obey and obey...

A heinous, heinous law
Of an endless, endless love
That governs your poor heart

In its velvety chambers, where fellows foul met
Engage in exchanges,
Whose ends are to put out your lights,

Who know from the inside you won't put up a fight

To a heinous, heinous law...

It's winter in my bedroom, I stir the broken spring,
And I have in my head to go crawling,
When the hounds come around I go to the bottle
Like every wet shadow before me.
Now are you angry at me 'cos I'm no longer free?
I don't sound it or say it or feel it.
O but out on the street somebody told me
It happens to everyone.
So I don't blame you, it's my foot in my shoe,
And I seem to have easily filled it,
While the thing in my charge, whether tiny or large,
I fear I may slowly have killed it,
Obeying a heinous, heinous law...